“i thought, you know, what in the world is this guy doing?” said brown, who owns a corn, soybean, hay, and beef cattle farm with his wife, jennifer, in highland county, ohio.

he couldn’t figure out what was growing — it was too tall and lanky for wheat — so he made a point of meeting his neighbor that summer. turns out, he had been tending to his field of cereal rye, a popular cover crop, a type of crop grown usually in off-seasons to improve soil health and mitigate erosion.

the pair got to talking about soil health and erosion, and soon brown set aside one of his bean fields for a cereal rye crop of his own.

interest in sustainable farming practices is building, and while independent and governmental conservation organizations can be good resources for promoting ecological practices, farmers say that swapping information peer-to-peer works best.

“i think the number one way this movement is growing, just like it grew with me, is from another farmer,” said brown, a 40-year-old first-generation farmer.

it’s been 10 years since he spied his neighbor drilling in the winter chill. today, he keeps 90% of his roughly 1,300 acres covered year-round.

wide lens mobile phones are important information-sharing tools for rural farmers around the globe, but many lack access to data and internet service. across africa, less than 40% of farming households have internet access, according to a 2020 study published in nature sustainability.

the missing ingredient

farmer interest in sustainability practices has grown, especially in soil health, said taylor dill, agriculture and natural resources educator for ohio state university’s darke county extension program.

it’s a national trend. the number of organic farms increased 39% from 2012 to 2017, according to the latest united states department of agriculture census, while the average farm put in place no-till practices on 374 acres of land, 29 more acres than in 2012. for cover crops, that average acreage increased from 77 to 100.

dill said that younger farmers — “the next generation that will inherit the land” — show a particular interest. with farmers of any age, “one of the most effective ways that we can teach farmers is being able to have another farmer speak to another farmer about an experience. they’re going to listen to their peers,” she said. 

greg mcglinch owns and operates down home farms in darke county. “word of mouth still means a lot in rural america,” he said.

wide lens farmers use mobile phones to grow their businesses, but the cost of owning a phone can set them back. low-income farmers in asia spend anywhere from 11 to 24% of their income on mobile services, according to a 2009 study. 

in that vein, brown started the “ohio soil health and cover crops” facebook group, which has racked up over 1,600 followers as of august 30, 2021. the feed includes everything from no-till instructional videos to requests for advice on best ratios for soil additives.

brown had a bad slug problem this year, but saw that the unwelcome pests weren’t showing up on his cover crop fields. he threw that idea out for the community to mull over. the page is there for farmers to crowd-source, said brown — “to bounce ideas off of one another, or solutions.”

farmers talk to each other. but that point is often missed on the national scale, dill said. much of the time, farmers are “overlooked,” she says, while the public, clamoring for sustainability measures, “want to go straight to having a policy rather than having a conversation first.”

that’s wonky, said dill, since “all of those decisions directly affect producers.”

science in the field

greg mcglinch’s farm is a checkerboard of harvestable crops, conservation practices and experimentation. on a clear june day, the 41-year-old farmer pointed out all the pieces from behind the wheel of a trundling four-wheeler.

there’s the strip of flowering plants between the forest grove, and a harvest field that acts as a habitat buffer. a low, concrete mass buried at one end of the creek is a head wall that keeps rainwater from ripping up the waterway’s banks. there’s the field of perennial wheatgrass that mcglinch said he didn’t quite know what to do with yet, except to “start playing and learning” how he could sell the hardy crop.

“it’s a real complex career,” he said, between deft sips of coffee from a sloshing mug as the four-wheeler tooled down a path toward his vegetable plot. mcglinch rotates the garden every year from one side to another, and moves the mobile chicken coop he built to the unoccupied side for a season of good fertilizer.

learning these techniques — “it’s kind of hard knocks,” he said. “i do a lot of reading and researching and talking with friends and (seeing) what other farmers are doing.”

sustainable farming practices aren’t just handed down from a lab to farmers, dill said. farmers often offer their own ideas; researchers try the ideas out on a farmer’s fields or at a small plot at a university, which publishes the results in peer-reviewed journals and in fact-sheets that farmers and extension educators use in field trips to disperse the information. and money is always part of the equation.

“when we’re talking with farmers, we’re talking about how we can be more sustainable,” dill said, “but also we need to be able to make sure they’re still productive.”

it’s not a simple yes or no as to whether sustainability practices cut costs, brown said. there are a lot of factors that make up the cost and profit of any one plot or field. he said he sees returns on expenses for seeding and tending cover crops in the reduced use of fertilizers and nutrient applications.

it’s a lot of looking forward, brown said. if his soil is healthy, for example, it will hold more water, making his crops less vulnerable in dry years.

“when i sit down and look at my budgets,’ he said, “i don’t want this to be an extra expense.” 

mcglinch also knows that balance well. “you’ve got to make a profit, or you can’t keep going,” he said. “at the same time, you’ve got to find a good balance, because we want to keep the land in the best shape.”

the farming industry hasn’t reached equilibrium yet, he said, but it can.

“we do need large-scale agriculture because we have a population to feed. it’s just a matter of how do we balance all that, too. i think there’s a way, it’s just, we’ve got to learn.”

it’s not all up to farmers, though. “at the end it’s going to come down to consumer decisions,” mcglinch said. “it’s the buying power. it’s what the consumer wants.”

—

about this series: the planet forward-fao summer storytelling fellows work was sponsored by the north america office of the food and agriculture organization of the united nations (fao), and the fellows were mentored by lisa palmer, gw’s national geographic professor of science communication and author of “hot, hungry planet.”

“it’s really healing to be able to tend to a space where food comes from,” said woods, shoveling fistfuls of leafy greens into bins. “you put love in and you get love out.”

woods is 24 years old and is part of a nonprofit urban farming program in omaha, nebraska called big muddy urban farm, which houses burgeoning young farmers rent-free, hands them $10,000 and a few urban plots, and guides them to build a business plan to pay back the loan. then, they get to growing.

“it’s like a simulation of a business,” woods said. the aspiring farmers get to hop in for a year with a financial safety net from years before if profits don’t cover costs.

the program minimizes some of the financial barriers that keep potential farmers from entering the industry, like low profit. many farmers have a working partner to make up a living income every year or a second job, like woods, who raps and produces freelance videos.

for producers, small-scale urban operations also avoid the financial challenges of buying swaths of expensive cropland. these farmers can’t grow enough food to fill huge orders, so they’re dependent on small and individual buyers.

about 50 to 60 customers buy from big muddy’s community supported agriculture. avenues to fresh produce are needed in the omaha-council bluffs metro area, where 9% of people live in a food desert, according to the landscape, a data collection project of the omaha community foundation.

nationally, 4% of people live in a food desert, an area where at least 1 in 3 live at least a mile from a grocery store and 1 in 5 people live below the poverty line.

wide lens a third of the globe lives in urban areas, according to a 2020 report from un habitat, which predicts that share will grow to 39% by 2035. at the same time, global demand for food will increase 70% by 2050, predicts the world bank.

money is a concern for producers, too. the farmers in big muddy’s program, like many young farmers, pick up odd jobs to keep their budget sheets in the black. the usda census reports that 65% of young farmers have a primary occupation other than farming.

with enough land, “i can grow as much food as i want, but if there’s nobody to buy it then i’m not going to make any money,” woods said.

a ‘big safety net’

when sophia cooper was a kid, she would catch fish in her hands in the trash-filled creek by her house in council bluffs, iowa. as a 20-year-old, she talked about that love of kicking around outside all day, and channeled that into her own farming and volunteer work, introducing kids in omaha to gardening and growing food.

“we always think kids aren’t paying attention, but they’re so good outside,” she said. “they’ll dig in the soil, they don’t care if they’re dirty. they have no cares.”

cooper is another resident at big muddy, and a senior at university of nebraska omaha, where she studies secondary education. she said she has options for what to do in the future, like teaching, wool farming, or cannabis farming, but she has to factor-in how to make a living.

the initial costs of starting a farm are daunting. “farmland typically stays within families for years and years, and then it’s expensive,” she said. “if you don’t have access to income already, then you’re just not going to get it. you’re just never going to be able to buy it.”

only 4% of farmland was expected to be sold from 2014 to19, according to a usda report, with 38% of those sales between relatives. 

wide lens lending to smallholder farmers is difficult, according to the world bank, which estimated in 2014 that their lending avenues were reaching less than 10 percent of smallholders.

cooper says free rent and land from big muddy are a big help, but she still works tutoring and waitressing gigs on the side.

woods said he knows people who are interested in starting their own farms, but it’s just too expensive for them to get started. for him, it’s a “big safety net” to not have to pay for rent and land, he said.

he could make the move to farming because “i didn’t put any risk into it,” he said.

representation matters

woods had been interested in sustainable agriculture before he ever considered farming in nebraska, but didn’t see people of color represented in his community until he took an online class run by ron finley, a black urban farmer and fashion designer.

“i was like, ‘oh, black people can grow food,’” woods said.

black farmers in america have historically faced significant social and economic barriers to owning and operating their own land. after emancipation, the u.s. government failed to implement a land settlement plan, leaving many former slaves with no economically viable option for buying land, according to a usda report.

the decades following saw mixed progress for black farmers. land ownership increased, but most black farmers faced “economic stagnation” fueled by racist jim crow laws, according to the report. and while the new deal of the 1930s shored up subsidies for white farmers, black farm ownership decreased from lack of access to those programs.

today, only 5% of american farmers are people of color, according to the usda census, though their numbers grew  7.5% from 2012 to 2017.

young, diverse farmers need to see their peers in the farming community, woods said. until finley’s class, he couldn’t see farming in his future. woods said, “i always thought agriculture was important, i just never could see myself being the person to do it.”

cooper wound her way under the beaming july sun through omaha’s gifford park neighborhood, where big muddy’s plots are scattered like neat, leafy vistas. she skirted behind a house to arrive at one of the farm’s chicken coops.

“it’s very hard to find a space,” she said, surveying the chickens. “being a woman, being a woman of color, like, where do i get accepted in this field?”

back at the house, woods finished packing up his kale for susan safia. she’s the founder of life elixir juice and a young, black woman. they packed the greens into safia’s car and haggled congenially for a moment over the price.

“the things that i can find locally, i really want to support because it helps my business,” she said. “i can say that this produce came locally.”

woods said he sees more and more people interested in where their food comes from. “i think people are just getting tired of living (a) life where they don’t actually get to connect with the earth,” he said.

across the street, the rows of cucumbers, melons, and squash that woods tends ate up the summer sun.

“you know, there’s something good even in just having your own backyard vegetable garden,” he said. sustainable, regenerative farming — “it’s the only right way to farm.” 

—

about this series: the planet forward-fao summer storytelling fellows work was sponsored by the north america office of the food and agriculture organization of the united nations (fao), and the fellows were mentored by lisa palmer, gw’s national geographic professor of science communication and author of “hot, hungry planet.”

breckbill is the majority shareholder of humble hands harvest in decorah, a town in the northeast corner of iowa. everything about her and her farm are atypical for the state, which churns out 18% of the u.s.’s soybean and corn crops every year, according to the iowa official register. breckbill, 34, is a first-generation, queer, organic vegetable farmer on a 22 acre worker-owned farm.

when she retires, she said, she’ll sell her shares at the price she bought them, regardless of how much the price of the land increases. so, the only money she’ll be making over her career is from what food she grows and sells. the point of the farm, breckbill said, is to serve the community and protect the land.

“the reason we’re running this business is to grow food for people and to steward the land well,” she said. “the whole wealth-building element of agriculture is not part of our purpose.” 

“but, it happens anyway,” she said. “land accrues in value.”

wide lens globally, 10% of rural populations account for 60 percent of agricultural land value, according to the land equality initiative report.

she’ll be giving up plenty of money by refusing to hike up the price of the shares once she sells, since the price of farm real estate in the corn belt is valued at $6,110 per acre, almost twice the national average, according to a 2020 report from the united states department of agriculture, which records farmland value rising steadily since 1993. 

that’s precisely the problem, breckbill said. the traditional model of land acquisition in farming means that young farmers need to buy or be given land owned by their families, or have enough capital to compete with big businesses. that’s a heavy barrier of entry for first-generation farmers like her. 

“i definitely could not have done it as an individual person,” breckbill said. but humble hands harvest didn’t face the usual start-up costs of a young farm.

wide lens only 1% of farms operate more than 70 percent of the world’s farmland, according to a 2020 report from the land equality initiative, while the large majority, 80%, of farms around the world are less than 5 acres.

“not in my backyard”

when the 22 acres at the end of hidden falls road went up for auction, the neighbors made a mad dash to buy the land at asking price — $5,500 an acre. 

if an industrial farm moved in, “it would definitely ruin the neighborhood as well as the air and water around here,” said steve mccargar, who lives five minutes down the gravelly lane in a solar grid-tied home he built using recycled timber from crumbling farmhouses. 

wide lens agriculture is the main degrader of inland and coastal waters in high-income and emerging economies, according to a 2017 united nations food and agriculture organization report: “farms discharge large quantities of agrochemicals, organic matter, drug residues, sediments and saline drainage into water bodies.”

mccargar and his partner heidi swets moved to decorah in the ’80s from ann arbor, michigan, in search of a place to live environmentally responsibly, a calling stoked by years of environmental activism and observance of the writing of back-to-the-land gurus helen and scott nearing. 

several of the neighbors on hidden falls road made the same pilgrimage, partly from “serendipity and accident,” partly to join the growing community of alternative thinkers. with a robust food co-op, the northeast iowa peace & justice center, luther college, and self-proclaimed “hippies” like mccargar roaming around, this town of 7,500 in the heart of corn country is a stew of progressivism and traditional ag in the heart of corn country.

mccargar spearheaded the local operation to buy what became humble hands harvest land. 

it started with a story that got around about a farm at the other end of the road, said mccargar, gesturing over his shoulder from where he sits in a fold-out chair in his garden. he tells the story like a preface.

“i had just been made aware of an auction that had happened at the end of our road,” he said — not breckbill’s end, but northwest, where the blacktop meets unpaved lane. a hog confinement operator from ossian, iowa, showed up and put in his bid. out of concern that his land would be sold off to a confinement operation, the farmer stopped the sale, mccargar said.

“we were all extremely grateful for his choice to protect the neighborhood,” he said, “even if it cost him the ability to sell the land that he wanted to sell.”

a year later, the plot that became humble hands harvest went up for auction. to avoid what had happened at the other end of the road, mccargar convinced the neighborhood to scramble and scrimp to buy the land outright. fifteen families raised the $122,000 in six weeks, created hidden falls llc, and bought the property.

the land belonged to the neighborhood, and deed restrictions would keep the shares from being sold to confinement operations in the future. the next step, mccargar said: “what are we going to do with this now that we’ve bought it?”

wide lens 31% of farmland on the contiguous 48 states is rented out by non-operators, according to a 2016 study by the united states department of agriculture. less than 1% of that share is owned through estates, cooperatives, municipalities and non-profit organizations. the rest is rented out by individuals, partnerships, corporations or trusts.

starting humble hands harvest

breckbill had landed in decorah in 2010. she was working at another farm at the time, but had her own aspirations for a cooperative vegetable farm. first step — buying a hidden falls llc share. the land’s topsoil had been eroded from 30 years of “corn on corn,” she said, so the llc members agreed to plant hay and stop tilling in order to breathe some life into the spent soil and pick up a certified organic label.

breckbill borrowed some money from an uncle, emptied her savings and crowdfunded to buy up more shares and put in a well and electricity. she now has eight shares; her business partner emily fagan has another five and as a cooperative they intend to buy the remaining nine.

“ideal world is that our farm, as a worker-owned co-op, will make just a seamless transition from one generation to another,” breckbill said. it works like this: one member retires, another farm worker buys their shares, and so “the same business will stick with this land for a long time,” she said.

a replicable model?

breckbill thinks the worker-owned cooperative model can be duplicated outside decorah.
“the only hope of young farmers is figuring out a different way to access land, and having people with wealth, even small amounts of wealth, being able to help that happen,” she said.

as for mccargar, he references wendell berry, who came to speak in decorah in 1994. berry’s idea, said mccargar, is that if the economy is a forest then the tallest trees that eat up the sunshine are the biggest industries. once they fall, smaller plants will have space to grow.

“if we imagine what alternative agriculture practitioners and theorists and gardeners and small-scale farmers and organic producers are all trying to do, it’s to create that vibrant understory,” mccargar said.

but it takes money, he said: “it’s not something you can do on a shoestring. you have to be able to leverage capital for this purpose.”

humble hands harvest is crowdfunding to build a permanent house on the farm, but meanwhile breckbill lives in a yurt by the garden patch, where rows of radishes, turnips and napa cabbages poke their green heads out of the earth.

breckbill talks animatedly about the generational model of farming and her vision for a greener future while her orange cat, apricat, snoozes in a chair to her right. land acquisition is a huge problem, said breckbill, but it’s not insurmountable.

“people caring about what’s happening on the landscape around them — wherever that happens, i think that can be replicated in some way.”

—

about this series: the planet forward-fao summer storytelling fellows work was sponsored by the north america office of the food and agriculture organization of the united nations (fao), and the fellows were mentored by lisa palmer, gw’s national geographic professor of science communication and author of “hot, hungry planet.”

the average age of u.s. farmers is 57, but the number of farmers under 35 grew 11% from 2012 to 2017, according to the latest census from the united states department of agriculture (usda). young farmers made up 9% of u.s. farm producers as of 2017.

sustainable farming practices are on the rise as well. farmers are turning away from tilling practices that chop up and erode nutritious topsoil. the amount of heavily tilled land decreased nearly a quarter from 2012 to 2017 while no-till acreage increased 8%. cover crops, which help farmers reduce erosion and increase biodiversity on their soil, doubled in acreage in the same period.

land use for certified organic products is also up by 9% from 2016 to 2019, and people are eating it up — sales rose 31%.

despite the numbers, sustainability is still a huge term. melissa kenney, director of research and knowledge initiatives at the university of minnesota’s institute on the environment, tackles it in two parts: “sustainability is not just an environmental concept. it is a concept that involves both the environment and society interwoven together,” she said.

environmentally, sustainability means minimizing or eliminating pollution and leaving the planet in better condition for future generations. sustainability also means providing people with basic necessary resources, kenney said.

“you can’t have solutions that are good for the environment if they don’t also benefit people right now.”

farmers are trying new things like cover cropping, no-till, and organic farming to preserve and regenerate the land. none of these methods is a catch-all, and their effectiveness can vary depending on any one farm’s geography, said paul west, co-director and lead scientist of the global landscapes initiative at the university of minnesota’s institute on the environment.

“but certainly, having a bundle or a suite of these approaches all at once certainly can lead to healthier soils and fields,” he said.

to get to the point of experimentation, though, young farmers need resources. the obstacles they face are varied, but they need at least three things to get their foot in the door: land, income, and community support.

—

about this series: the planet forward-fao summer storytelling fellows work was sponsored by the north america office of the food and agriculture organization of the united nations (fao), and the fellows were mentored by lisa palmer, gw’s national geographic professor of science communication and author of “hot, hungry planet.”